RUNNING TIMES

Boston Champ Geoffrey Mutai Cagey, Confident for First NYC Marathon

Published

November 5, 2011

By Scott Douglas
Photo by Victah SailerIt’s easy to be confident when you’ve run a marathon faster than the world record.Geoffrey Mutai seemed supremely confident while talking to the media Friday morning. This year’s Boston Marathon champion, he famously ran 2:03:02 in April, faster than the then world record of 2:03:59 (and faster since the new record of 2:03:38, set in September in Berlin). Because of Boston’s net elevation loss and too-great variance between start and finish lines, the time gets one of the biggest asterisks in running history, but nonetheless doesn’t count as a world record. Still, as Mutai points out, “I ran faster than the record and there were no pacemakers and it is 42 kilometers.” Translation: The stat geeks can think what they want, but my time is legit.Mutai also seemed nonplussed about the fact that he hasn’t raced in months, or that he has no idea what he has to do to get selected for the Kenyan Olympic marathon team, or that he’s unfamiliar with New York City’s course, or that on Sunday he’ll face this year’s London Marathon winner, the previous year’s London winner, the last two New York City winners and the silver medalist from the last Olympics, among others in what’s probably the deepest men’s field in race history. The most he would say to repeated questions about the depth of the field, race strategy and the like was, “There is no way you can run slow and win here.” Bearing in mind that the course record of 2:07:43 must seem slow when you’ve run 2:03:02, it’s probably safe to count Mutai among those who think that 10-year-old mark will fall on Sunday. Oh, and he did sort of casually throw out the words “1:03 halfway.”After winning Boston, Mutai ran some excellent shorter races, including a 27:19 10K in Boston in June to win by almost a minute over the likes of reigning New York City champ Gebre Gebremariam and this year’s Chicago winner, Moses Mosop. After winning the Bogota Half Marathon on July 31, he returned to Eldoret, a 200,000-person city near the Rift Valley. From that base, he does the bulk of his training in more rural Kapng’entuny. He says he coaches himself, and is the leader of a large training group. One member of the group, Jafred Kipchumba, won Holland’s Eindhoven Marathon last month in 2:05:48, a course record more than a minute under the old mark, set by one Geoffrey Mutai in 2009. When the guys you beat up on in workouts do things like that, it probably means you’re on the right track. “I know how to improve myself,” Mutai says. “Nothing has changed in my training. I feel like I did last time [before Boston].”The Kenyan federation has said it will make its decision on what three men will run the Olympic marathon after New York. But the Kenyan federation says a lot of things. “I don’t hear from them,” Mutai says of the notoriously corrupt and fickle federation. “I cannot force myself to be on the team. If I get on the team, I will be happy. If not, I will focus on other things.”The most obvious other thing would be a world record attempt on a record-eligible course. If Mutai doesn’t get picked for the Olympics, he might not necessarily defend his Boston title. “I will try on a flat course,” he says (nonchalantly, of course) about the world record. Seeing his countryman Patrick Makau set the record in September “was another challenge and motivation,” Mutai says. “That was the chance for him. I was happy to see him set the record because now I know it is possible for me.”First, though, he reminds the record-hungry media around him, “I am fighting for Sunday.”